At restaurants we sometimes can’t finish all the food that is given us, and sometimes ask for a ‘doggy bag’ to be made up from our leftovers so that no food is wasted. Ostensibly, the bag is taken home to feed the dog; sometimes, we may well eat the leftovers ourselves!
Obviously it’s a good idea not to waste food, and it’s surprising what tasty meals can be made from leftovers (bubble and squeak, for example, is a dish made up of the leftover potato and cabbage from a Sunday dinner.) Even Jesus commanded the leftovers to be collected in after feeding the five thousand so that nothing was wasted! (see Jn 6:12-13)
What is perhaps one of the most encouraging verses in the whole Bible is tucked away in James 4:6: ‘But He gives us more grace.’ Grace is not just needed to open our eyes to God’s salvation (Eph 2:8-9), it is an ongoing part of our everyday lives. We need grace on a daily basis, just as the Israelites had to collect manna on a daily basis, collecting twice the amount on the day preceding the Sabbath so that they could obey God’s commandment to rest on the Sabbath. There are days when we feel we cannot carry on a step further, but then we find, unexpectedly, like hikers discovering capacious pockets containing nutrition bars, that He gives us more grace. We don’t just have ‘enough’ grace to survive; we have ‘more than enough’, a super-abundance of grace, grace that sustains us through the difficult times. (2 Cor 12:8-9)
Dig deep, for there will be a doggy bag of grace waiting for you somewhere today!
